Laser technology breakthroughs and advances have provided an increasing variety of useful applications and industrial implementations of laser beams. Beams can be directed to one or more targets to cut, weld, anneal, ablate, heat, melt, or produce another type of laser processing based effect on or in the target, in a selective fashion. Different applications typically require beams with different characteristics, such as variations in output beam peak power, average power, response time, beam quality and beam parameter product, beam uniformity, beam precision, etc. However, despite the the variety of applications and corresponding variety laser system characteristics that support the applications, laser systems remain rigidly designed for specific applications and laser system components cannot be conveniently replaced, upgraded, or updated without replacing the entire laser system. Hence, further innovation to overcome these drawbacks is needed.